Photography © Chad Parenteau

 

Some of Us are Tired

Of mid-term ballots
Pre-printed in boardrooms—
Big Pharma, United Health, Lockheed Martin;
Of the shiny maple tables,
Surround sound & smell of vapid lavender.
Of underwriting overseas starvation campaigns
Of civilians carried in caskets
Of knowing our soldiers, whose brains aren’t yet
Fully grown into their skulls,
Lay in boxes in airplanes over
raging oceans,
again; as searchlights hide the ire
Of ghosts on deserted islands.
We’ve been pointing this out, over and over
Since before the parties in 1999—
So excuse us, our eyes
Are often checkered purple
With dimples, dire with rage.

Some of us are tired of being slandered
Over common sense.
Did you know that Thomas Paine & Otto Von Bismarck
Calculated that a rich, industrialized nation
Could sign all of you up for an affordable health care program
With the swirl of a pen over a maple table?
But we don’t lose any sleep
Over the fact that corporate officers @ Cigna prefer us
Dead; or that their stock
Goes up when we die, no
We don’t lose sleep over these facts;
The Right Side of History is a cool pillow
By the soft overhead hum of a ceiling fan
Clearing the summer air
through an open country window.

Some of us are spiritually tired,
But we’ve got enough in the tank
To flip every table they’ve ever built,
Are building, or will ever build.
Our rising fumes remind us
That lavender scented maple tables
Are created & destroyed every day;
That the soul presages the body
And goes someplace.
So if we die of pen swirls
Inflicted on screens in a cloud—
Tired as we are, we’ll rest well.
We can’t be created or destroyed.

 

Jason Youngclaus was born in Boston and graduated from College of the Holy Cross in 2005. He is the author of “Little Planet Raisins (Spartan Press, 2020.) He believes that if his cat Stella sits and listens to him play a particular song on the guitar, that this song must therefore be of some spiritual verve and value. You can find him on Instagram @jyc_music_lyrics.

Chad Parenteau is Associate Editor of Oddball Magazine.